Rose Red
by SandietheMafioso
Summary: All demons were human once.


Title: Rose Red

Word Count: ~1,000

Rating/Warnings: PG-13, strong language, sexual situations mentioned but not described, brief mentions of torture and suicide

Summary: All demons were human once.

The villagers called her a sinner and a slut, and worse things besides, but she couldn't bring herself to care. Fifteen years old, no parents to speak of, and Mathilde, a younger sister who needed food and a warm place to sleep. If ridicule was the price, she'd pay it gladly.

That the big manor had needed a scullery maid was luck. That the master had an eye for her was nothing short of the miracle she'd prayed for. No man of his station would marry her- maybe no man at all would marry her. But if he wanted her in his bed, that meant security for her and Mathilde.

Rose had panicked the first time he kissed her. "My lord- your wife-"

"Can have no objections, as long as you exercise discretion," he said. "She has no right to make any demands of me."

The mistress of the house looked on her with nothing more than resignation and disdain, when she looked on her at all. The other servants ignored it. She wasn't the first.

In church, after Mass. "A word, Rose?"

"Yes, Father?"

"You do realize you're living in sin, don't you?"

"I don't know what you mean, Father." Discretion.

"Having relations with a married man…come to confession, my child. Repent."

"I have nothing to confess."

The priest's lips thinned. "Then I must ask you to leave the congregation until you admit to your wrongdoing. I will not have God's house profaned."

So she left and never went back. She no longer prayed. She'd had all she wanted of a God who would dangle a solution to her woes in her face and then vilify her for taking it.

Life in the manor was an answer to all her prayers, at least until Mathilde got sick. She didn't show anyone the pustules in her groin and armpits, but she couldn't hide the fever that soon followed.

"Please, my lord, send for someone," Rose said.

"There's nothing we can do. She's as good as dead."

"People can be healed from this, I know it's happened- a priest, maybe, someone can help!"

"Enough!" He struck her across the face to emphasize this point. "Get out! Mourn your sister, there's no healing her!"

Cheek stinging from the back of her master's hand, Rose hurried out of the room. First, she would find a way to help Mathilde. Then she would make him pay for refusing to aide her.

The first task proved more difficult that she would have thought. Anyone who had real healer's skills had learned from the church, and they weren't about to do any favors for a rich man's whore.

"Please, whatever you think of me, my sister is innocent!"

"And now she's paying for your crimes," many of them hissed, slamming the door in her face.

Mathilde had been fading for days and Rose was getting desperate. She called on the village midwife as a last resort.

"Come in, my dear," said the elderly woman, smiling. "Tell me what ails you."

Rose eyed the midwife with suspicion. She looked different, her carriage more erect, her eyes brighter than they had been before. But Rose still entered the cottage. "It's my sister. She's sick."

"Your sister is dying, and there isn't anything a midwife or any other person could do about it."

Rose was about to spit out an angry retort, but then she looked at the old woman again. She caught a strange, acrid scent in the air, poorly concealed by the drying herbs that lined the ceiling. "But you're not the midwife, are you?"

The old woman, or the thing that wore her body, cackled. "Sharp one, you are. I can cure your sister and give you revenge on your master, for the right price."

It was poetic, in the end. The lord of the manor and his family seemed to grow ill as rapidly as Mathilde grew well. It was a little too poetic, maybe, but as soon as Rose heard whispers of "witchcraft," she fled with Mathilde to a neighboring village.

She'd bargained with the demon for ten years, time enough to get her affairs in order. Mostly that meant seeing Mathilde married to a crofter, a simple, sturdy man who would care for her. They lived with his family in a crowded house by the sea. Rose was sorry to leave them, when the time came, sorry not to see their first child born. But she'd been hearing monstrous growls late at night, dreaming of claws and teeth. One night she took a walk to the cliffs and never came back, preferring to dash her body on the rocks below than to wait for whatever brutal messenger the demon sent to collect her soul.

If Hell had been anything like what the priests said, fire and brimstone and eternal mortification of the flesh, she thought she might have held up a little better. Then again, eternity was eternity, so maybe it wouldn't have mattered.

For so long, it was nothing but pain. Then the torturer's face swimming up in her vision, offering her release.

"I can let you down, if you'll take up the whip in our service."

Temptation. She was so tired. "Give it to me. I'll do anything."

She learned to hurt people, and she learned she was good at it. She was also good at forgetting. Forgetting their faces and their voices, forgetting she ever knew a life other than this one.

"You there. What's your name?"

She paused in torturing a young woman to look for where the question came from. It was a tall, well-dressed man with bright yellow eyes. Unused to seeing a human form that wasn't on the rack, she felt compelled to look down at her own body. There wasn't much left of it, bits and pieces held together by black smoke.

"Your name?" the tall demon prompted.

Opening her mouth to answer, she realized she didn't remember. She looked at the instrument in her hand, a red-hot poker. The color stirred a distant memory, one syllable, two, a jewel that sparkled like a live coal around the neck of a woman who gazed on her with contempt. "Ruby. My name is Ruby."

"Ruby, I have a proposition for you. How would you like to go topside for a while?"


End file.
